Coldfusion is power with ease. It gets most anything done faster, cheaper, on time compared to any other language.

The language is no where in decline or dying, it’s used by very large organizations who seem to value CF developers highly. Developers can be hard to find, but on the flip side, its probably the easiest language to learn for the web and easily among the top in terms of power and ability.

I do a fair amount of PHP work too and all I have to say is that if I have the choice, I use ColdFusion. I have often put in two bids on a project with the Coldfusion bid being 75% the price of the PHP price because it saves so much time. The cost of a CF license has never been an issue, and now there’s plenty of great open source engines.

In the 10+ years I have been with ColdFusion, I have only had more and more work, and focus on it almost exclusively when I have a chance. It is the programming language I think in, and thankfully so, as it’s pretty simple.

The wealth of built in features it comes with, standardized from Adobe can’t be matched by any other language that I’ve found so far. You would end up buying a lot of third party libraries to work with PDF’s, etc., that all comes built in to CF.

There’s a lot of other great points that have been made here. What do you have to lose? Try it out for a few months, you can always move to something else, but I don’t think you’ll look back.